How experiential marketers can raise the bar in 2018

Experiential Marketers

Currently, there’s a lot so celebrate if you’re an experiential marketer. During a period rife with predictions of falling ad spend, brands are considering growing their experiential budgets.  

According to a 2017 report from Rakuten Marketing, 80 percent of global audiences say that online advertising hasn’t got any better with time, on any device or platform, which only highlights further why brands are choosing to take the route of experiential.

And it’s the same picture of growth around the world, with U.K. spend increasing by 22 percent, according to the country’s advertising body, Institute Practitioners in Advertising, and similarly buoyant statistics are coming out of Europe and APAC regions.

So, everything’s just great, right? The experience economy is booming, brands are seeking real-world impact, the creative industries are putting dollars behind new capabilities—really, what more do we need to do but let the good times roll?

Well, lots actually.

Sustaining growth beyond being the “bright shiny new object,” relies on the global experiential industry really stepping up its approach to accountability and results. I would say experiential is one of the most misunderstood techniques, and if we’re going to continue to build confidence from marketers, we need to address a few burning issues.

So, let’s explore what I believe are the three top priorities for experiential marketers:

1. Recognise that experiential isn’t a channel

Unlike advertising, experiential can’t be broken down into formatted executions—print, outdoor, radio etc. Unfortunately, experiential is a little more complex. For lack of a better definition, experiential is the art of “expressing a brand’s purpose and proposition through a form of real world consumer interaction.”

“Experiential” is an adjective, not a noun, right? It describes a way of marketing that can be limitless in form, idea and environment. Because of this, I’d caution against the labeling of campaigns, which applies to the use of “events,” too. Events are a type of experience, but this shouldn’t be the generic descriptor for a multitude of different live creative activations.

2. Embrace brand planning

Experiential planning can’t simply mean finding the best venue or maximizing attendees. It requires traditional brand planning. What’s the up-stream business challenge? What perception do we want to reinforce or change? What’s the core consumer insight at the heart of the creative concept?

For impact to last beyond interaction, our “thinking” capabilities and processes should be no different to those found down the corridors of traditional ad land. Think of a live experience as a piece of sophisticated brand messaging, no different than a 60-second TV ad. Every experiential agency needs a brand strategist, someone who is as important as your senior producer.

3. Measure, measure, measure

NFL player and coach Vince Lombardi once said, “If you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing.”

Experiential marketing has baggage, and bad baggage at that. Experiential agencies are often obsessed with anecdotal consumer feedback, time-lapse films showing the ‘event in action,’ surveys reporting that 99 percent of attendees said ‘it was great, we loved taking part.’ All these elements can be important to a rounded piece of evaluation, but are really not a clear indication of the attitudinal shift, the change in consumer behavior or the incremental profit generated from the experiential campaign.

So, let’s attack the myth. Experiential marketing should be evaluated to ensure campaigns are not only justifiable to the finance director, but also so that a “learn and evolve” mentality can be applied to continually improve next year’s campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s no “one size fits all” methodology that can be applied in order to achieve this. However, in general terms, using qualitative research techniques is a worthwhile starting point. For instance, understanding consumer’s perceptions and behavior before, during and after an experience and comparing these to a control group of consumers not exposed to the experience can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of a creative idea in communicating the right message, to solicit the right reaction.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s fantastic news that experiential marketing is in such good health globally, but in order to sustain, grow and reaffirm its status as one of the most influential marketing techniques, both now and in the future, we need to get our house in order.

Sarah Priestman is President of Sense New York.

This article first appeared in Ad Week.

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Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy or amplify your retail marketing moves. Get them here at The Futures Lab.

London

5th Floor Century House
100 Oxford Street
London
W1D 1LN

New York

243 E 14th
#2 C/O SQ
New York
NY 10003

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Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy here at The Future Lab

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Experiential

Whether it be Festivals, Trade Shows, PR Stunts, Installations or Pop Ups to name a few, we believe brand experiences are one of the most powerful forms of marketing to impact consumer perception and attitude towards a brand. They can create real behaviour change when born out of a deep consumer insight allied to a compelling idea. And it’s these fundamentals we look to get right whatever the live, virtual or hybrid task in hand.

Sampling.

Sampling is all too often perceived as an unsophisticated, somewhat ‘blunt’ marketing tool. Over the last 16 years Sense has pioneered a set of strategic principles which underpin our unique approach to sampling and which are highly measurable from both an ROI and consumer behaviour change perspective. We will happily guide brands through the myriad of sampling channels and products available so whether it’s mass face to face sampling, in offices, digitally, at home or just a strategic framework that you are after, we can provide a blend of tactics to fulfil both brand and sales objectives.

Retail.

With many clients now focused on activating in channels more closely associated with a sale, our heavyweight retail experience closes the loop on a typical shopper journey by encompassing the moment of truth in store. Be it prize promotions, shopper toolkits, key visual creation, path-to-purchase communications, category strategy, B2B campaigns or Amazon optimisation, our goal is to create forward-thinking retail experiences that deliver demonstrable brand value. We aim to make ‘retail fail’ a thing of the past for ambitious brands looking to thrive is an ever-competitive landscape and believe our streamlined team is perfectly placed to do this.

Foresight.

Knowing what will keep a brand bright, exciting, and vital means we need to keep one step ahead of the curve. Our thought leadership hub, The Futures Lab, helps us to understand the marketing trends of tomorrow. It’s also the origin of strategies and methodologies which have created over 65 award-winning campaigns. 

Rigour.

Creativity is nothing without results. And we know that commissioning bold concepts, capable of changing minds, requires reassurance that it’s the right thing to do. 

Data, insights, and research precedes every campaign we do, and our proprietary measurement tool, EMR, gives us a decade of campaign performance metrics. Which is why we’re proud to have been recognised as industry-leading by brands like The Economist, Coca-Cola, and Molson Coors. 

Trust.

We believe brand experience is inherently more varied than other forms of marketing. No formula, no template, no cookie-cutter approach – and often no precedent. 

That’s why, Sense places trust at the heart of its business – grounded in teamwork between our people and yours. Our processes are efficient, our senior team stay involved and our partnership mentality had helped us sustain powerful client relationships, some lasting over 10 years.